And so the story begins…

My mother was an adventurous soul who wanted to give her children something she had never had, the adventure of travel. As early as I can remember, she took us on summer-long trips across the United States, leaving my father behind to build his electronics consulting business. During the late 1960s, she bravely took to the road in the family Buick station wagon with four young children and a giant canvas tent with three bedrooms, a living room, and a patio.

She was a masterful planner who orchestrated these trips with nothing but a handful of brochures and a telephone, making reservations at KOA campgrounds where we would stay only a single night before moving on. This was what she lived for, collecting ideas along the way, beginning to plan next summer’s trip the moment we arrived home just in time for the school year.

This is where I learned to come alive.

There was danger in a woman traveling alone with her children, and she never sheltered me from it. The fear, the anticipation—these things breathed life into our adventures. I learned to love the excitement that comes from living on the edge, the aliveness that can only come from new experiences, from facing life without a safety net. We weathered tornadoes that mangled our tent poles and spent nights cramped together in the station wagon. I had experiences that threatened my life.

I imagine I must have been afraid. But that’s not what I remember, and it’s not what I took away.

These experiences didn’t just change me; they shaped who I would become. A woman who felt most alive in the middle of uncertainty. A woman who needed adventure and freedom the way other people needed safety and routine. But they also made me fundamentally different from other kids my age. I grew up faster. I was more aware. And I was not afraid to die. My worst fear was something else entirely: that I might waste this precious gift of life, that I might squander the time I’d been given to live it fully.

That fear pushed me out the door. I set out on my own at 13, again at 14, and for the last time at 15, when I hitchhiked alone from Bethesda, Maryland, where I had been living with legal guardians after not being allowed to return home, all the way to Santa Cruz, California.

I made my home on the streets, where I met and married a man 7 years older than me, a man I have always thought of as my soulmate. I was only fifteen years old, full of spirit and a deep love for living life to the fullest. Together we hitchhiked up and down the West Coast; it was the most amazing time of my life.

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